Month: December 2013

As mentioned in the blog post for the 2013-12-23 server release, a useful new feature for editors is the option to add new entities directly from inline search fields:

There’s an “Add a new [entity]” button at the bottom of (most) search result menus, which upon clicking will open up a dialog in the page. The dialog contains a form identical to the one you’re used to when creating entities the old-fashioned way — that is, from the Editing menu at the top of the website.

Once you’ve successfully added a new entity from the dialog, it’ll be automatically loaded into the search field you started from.

The visible exceptions to this feature are that you can’t add new areas (only location editors can add those), or releases (because those take a lot longer to add, and it wouldn’t be useful to do so in a small dialog that you can accidentally close), and finally, you can’t spawn an add-entity dialog within another add-entity dialog. 🙂

Another change that went along with this feature (that editors should be aware of) is that we now require artists and labels to be selected on the “Release Information” tab of the release editor.

Previously, you could enter plain text into these fields, proceed to the next tab without selecting a search result, and handle creation on the “Add Missing Entities” tab. Because “Add Missing Entities” has a very limited UI, in the future we’d like to remove it in favor of easier entity-creation on the other tabs. This is a small step towards that. Note that you can still use “Add Missing Entities” for track artists — this change only affects the release artist and release labels on the first tab.

On Sunday, December 29th at 1pm PST, (2pm AZ, 4pm EST, 9pm UK, 10pm CET) we’re going to swap out our network switch. During this time all MusicBrainz sites hosted in California will be unavailable. (that is all sites, save for the primary and secondary FTP mirrors and the FreeDB gateway).

The work will not start exactly at 1pm, but we’re doing to start executing our plan at 1pm. The exact time for the outage will be announced via Twitter and via the banner on musicbrainz.org

We hope that this outage will last only 10-15 minutes, but as these things typically go, you’ll never know how long it will really take.

Another two weeks and once again, a nice pile of fixed bugs! Thanks to uk/chirlu and reosarevok for fixing a few bugs along with the MetaBrainz team.

Some bits that might interest you:

It’s now possible to get an add-entity dialog right from the inline search fields. This should make it much easier to add relationships, especially, as well as creating new artists and labels where needed in the release editor. This also ends up improving the already-existing dialog for creating works in the relationship editor, to include the full functionality of the add work page. We’re hoping to get a fuller blog post on this feature up in the coming days.

The artist overview now filters out many release groups by default, for a less cluttered view that should more reliably include only the main discography of bigger artists, rather than including a lot of bootlegs, concert recordings, and other releases that aren’t always useful to see. Of course, there’s still a button to see all release groups.

Perhaps less obvious than other changes, but a lot of colors and some other minor styles have changed slightly on the site, as part of a reorganization of our CSS files.

… and, of course, the usual crop of bugs and small improvements. There’s a full list below. The tag for this release is v-2013-12-23.

In case the name didn’t tip you off, this is rather more casual of a get-together than our usual summits, but for those of you with the inclination, a free weekend and a decent way of getting to Chicago: we discovered that our fearless leader Rob was going to be in the same city as one of our developers (bitmap) and figured we’d fly me (the other developer) in too and make a thing of it! We’ll be hanging out in-person through January 25-26, plus probably part of the evening of January 24th, and we’d love to have you join us.

We don’t have much by way of details, at present, in part because this is quite informal. However, if you’re interested, we have a wiki page with arrival times for those of us with plane tickets already, and which we’ll update with any other plans we end up making. If you’d like to come, please add yourself!

We need to do essential maintainance on the main MusicBrainz database server today (specifically upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS). We’re aiming to get this work completed within an hour, and will require MusicBrainz to be in read-only mode for the duration of the upgrade. We’re going to go read-only from 2PM UTC (6AM PST, 9AM EST, 3PM CEST) to begin this work.

Hello! It’s been another two weeks and it’s time for another release of musicbrainz-server. Thanks to intgr, Freso, and bitmap for their contributions to this release alongside ocharles and I. Congratulations also to bitmap, who becomes part of the official MetaBrainz team today.

This release is primarily bug fixes and small tweaks, though perhaps the most visible change is that Places and Works now have custom entity icons like most of our other entities already did.

Yesterday evening I had a call with my contacts at Amazon and a person from the Accounts Payable department. Over the last two days they were able to work out the kinks in their accounting with regard to the MetaBrainz Foundation.

They verified that the outstanding invoices from our perspective were correct, including the now infamous invoice #144. Shortly after the call, a check for $22,500 was cut and will arrive in California by 10:30am today. I’ve also received a complete history of all of the payments made to the MetaBrainz Foundation and I’m happy to say that everything looks great to me.

Also, an issue surrounding this invoice was pointed out to me: If invoice #144 wasn’t outstanding, all of this would’ve been a bit drastic. I agree with that, but what I failed to mention in my last blog post was that if invoice #144 wasn’t paid, then invoice #200 (which is 3 months younger than #144) was outstanding. The matter at hand was that there was a 3 year, or a nearly 3 year, old invoice outstanding. Personally, I really wanted to gain clarity around what happened nearly 3 years ago and finally put the issue to bed.

Finally, I would like to commend Amazon on how they handled matters in the last week. When prodded hard enough, Amazon got their act together, got to work and figured out this mess and then swiftly cut a check. I’ll keep posting updates about this until the check is in the bank and has cleared, but it certainly looks like we’re heading to a complete resolution of this matter early next week.